Aunt's 85th Birthday Bash

Auntie's 85th Birthday Bash
Originally uploaded by carltonsoohoo

I'll post these lovely group photos from time to time. 360-degree panoramic photography is not just limited to scenes. It's very straightforward to do small groups such as this photo and larger ones with 150 people. The way it's created is to have people sit around the camera in an equidistant radius. This doesn't always happen for various reasons but people's sizes are more comparable if they sit equidistantly.

Because it is a spherical three-dimensional image to begin with, the flattened projection will still have distortion the farther away from the center of the lens. For example, think about how a world map is a flattened projection of a three-dimensional globe. The land masses near the poles are distorted and stretched out. Even land masses near the equator have some distortion relative to how they look on a globe.

Nevertheless, it is possible to show people with minimal distortion as long as they are close to the center of the image. Closer to the ground and sky will have distortion. If you were holding the photo in your hands, you could curve it around so the edges were touching, thus re-creating close to the original circle that people were sitting around. Then if you looked down into the photo, you would see distortion removed and the roof line of the house would appear to be straight.

Cool huh?